Hear him roar: ‘I am a male feminist’ declares PM

At a number of functions to mark International Women’s Day, the Prime Minister empathised with the working women of Australia, and defended his “fair dinkum” paid parental leave scheme.
Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

At separate functions, all to mark International Women’s Day, the Prime Minister empathised with the working women of Australia as he mounted a strident defence of his “fair dinkum" paid parental leave scheme.

At a breakfast on Tuesday, he had a crack at those on the left, claiming they would be lauding the policy had it come from anyone else but himself.

“Just imagine if a progressive had come up with this idea?’’ he said.

“The usual suspects would have been cheering and saying about time. But because a conservative has come up with this idea so many people are saying there must be something wrong with it."

Abbott acknowledged that given his conservative past, he and the policy were an odd fit. He likened his epiphany to
Richard Nixon
visiting China.

“This was one of those moments when people from all sides of politics needed to realise that a watershed had been reached,’’ he said.

At a reception for women in the media on Wednesday night, Abbott again, unprompted, spruiked the policy, describing himself in the process as “a male feminist’’.

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And again at an IWD breakfast on Friday. In case anyone has not received the message by now, Abbott is not going to dump the policy he first announced – without running it past the party – to mark International Women’s Day in 2010 and address what was then a problem he had with female voters.

For the past four years, despite the urging of his colleagues, senior and junior, as well as business and industry and now the Commission of Audit, Abbott has stuck to the policy like chewy to a blanket. It is inextricably linked to him. If it goes, surely he goes, and that won’t happen.

The policy would pay a woman her full wage for six months, capped at salary of $150,000, or $75,000 over six months. Scheduled to start on July 1, 2015, the policy, according to the Coalition’s own pre-election costings estimate, will cost the budget about $5.5 billion a year.

Not even the Senate, either current or post-July 1, will save the government from having to implement it, because the Greens stand alone in support.

They want to reduce the $150,000 cap to $100,000, or $50,000 for six months.

It is a small concession as the vast majority of women earn less than $100,000. Thus there will be no meaningful budget savings. “It’s not significant," Treasurer
Joe Hockey
told The Australian Financial Review, of the savings that would be achieved by amending the salary cap.

“Very few people over $100,000 will be claiming it.’’

Scheme contradicts budget savings

There is nothing wrong will a full-wage replacement paid parental leave scheme. Australia is one of the few OECD countries not to have one.

But the problem for the government is that pushing ahead with the scheme in the current environment, contradicts just about every principle it is espousing.

Even the principle of principle itself.

Addressing his party room on Tuesday, Abbott explained that there would be more tough decisions like that on Qantas to come. “What gets you through is having a principle that guides you,’’ he said.

It was an advance on his philosophy in opposition when he told the party room that when faced with a choice between “policy purity and political pragmatism, I’ll take pragmatism every time’’. The PPL scheme is more in the vein of pragmatism than policy purity.

Then there is due diligence, which the government performed before knocking off Qantas’s bid for a debt guarantee. Communications Minister
Malcolm Turnbull
spent much of this week deriding Labor’s National Broadband Network and mocking the fact it was conceived by Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy on the back of an envelope. The PPL scheme stands similarly charged.

The most obvious contradiction is budgetary. At a cost of $22 billion over four years, the PPL scheme is very expensive and will be implemented right at the time when the government is talking about ending the age of entitlement and trying to make structural savings to the budget. Despite all the claims that the PPL scheme is a productivity measure, it continues to muddy the Coalition’s political and economic message.

Joe Hockey, who looks as if he is in a hostage situation when he defends the scheme, issued a cri de coeur on Thursday when asked how he would fund both PPL and childcare.

“The trajectory of childcare is incredible. The cost increases that currently foreshadow us are significant for the government’s budget,’’ he said.

The cost of the childcare rebate – which the government promised before the election not to means test – and the lesser childcare benefit is estimated at $22 billion over the next four years. Hockey says the numbers accelerate rapidly after that.

It is safe to say that subsidising childcare and funding the PPL scheme will very soon cost the budget in excess of $50 billion over the forward estimates.

Criticism from Coalition

It is not just progressives criticising the scheme. It is the Coalition’s core constituents – business and industry groups, economic dries and CEOs, its own MPs. All argue that any spare money would be much better spent on childcare because enabling women to get back to work is where the productivity dividend lies, not getting paid a lot to stay home for six months when they were going to stay home anyway.

In opposition, Abbott cleverly promised to ask the Productivity Commission to look into childcare. How to make the system more flexible, possibly to include nannies, all within the same funding envelope. It was a smart political call that resonated with time-poor parents, and a call that Labor was wrong to lampoon.

But if it were a truly serious assessment of childcare-related productivity, its terms of reference would also have extended to paid parental leave.

The trouble for the government is that the commission looked at PPL for Labor, and it was based on that report, released in 2009, that Labor modelled its scheme of 18 weeks at the minimum wage.

The commission looked at all scenarios before deciding 18 weeks at minimum wage struck the right balance between the cost to taxpayers and providing an adequate level of short-term support.